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In part one, we suggested 5 essential books to understand and practice marketing in the modern landscape. Many of you liked the list and asked for other suggestions. Those of you, who missed the first part, click here.

Now we are recommending 5 more books (in no particular order) that should be essential readings for any marketer. Enjoy!

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers By Seth Godin

Written by one of the world’s foremost marketing experts, this avant garde book explains the shortcomings of interruptive marketing and how a permission based approach is essential in establishing long term customer relationships.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant By Renée Mauborgne

A thought-provoking seminal work, this book talks about eliminating competition by finding untapped new market spaces (blue oceans). It will change the way you look at your competition.

Groundswell, Expanded and Revised Edition: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies By Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

One of the original books on social media, it takes an authoritative look at social technologies and how to integrate social media into your marketing strategy.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly By David Meerman Scott

New rules indeed! This book provides a comprehensive view of the new online marketing landscape. It ties all the web 2.0 elements together and provides a blueprint on how to be successful in this changing age. Full of tactical examples and action plans, it is a must read for inbound marketers.

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity By Avinash Kaushik

Per Seth Godin, “Analytics is vitally important, and no one explains it more elegantly, more simply, or more powerfully than Avinash Kaushik. Consider buying up all the copies of this book before your competition gets a copy.”

This unique solution simplifies many complex operational challenges currently seen by cleaning, maintenance, and janitorial companies. It enables a company to better manage leads, opportunities, and customers. In addition to generating quotes and work orders with approval processes, users of Soffront CRM are able to record inspections, schedule employee and vehicle shifts, and easily create inspection reports for customers. Additionally, tracking contract expirations, employees’ leaves/overtimes, and customer complaints/resolutions are simplified and organized.

This easy-to-use solution comes with the flexibility and best-in-class adoption rate of Soffront’s integrated CRM software to fully automate sales, marketing and operations. It comes pre-integrated with Intuit Quickbooks and Soffront provides services to integrate with other back-office products using our robust back-office integration tools.

“We did extensive market research among business owners in the cleaning industry. They told us that the business flow for cleaning companies does not readily fit into any generic CRM system,” said Manu Das, President and Founder of Soffront. “We worked with cleaning companies to build this vertical CRM to help them automate operations, increase sales, and provide better customer service.”

About Soffront

For nineteen years, Soffront has provided CRM solutions for small-to-medium sized companies. Compared to other leading CRM providers, Soffront CRM drives more sales by helping sales teams spend more time selling and less time in the CRM. Companies that switch to Soffront report significant cost savings with drag-and drop customization and the elimination of add-ons. Soffront’s integrated CRM contains all of the required functionality including sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service, and project management. Soffront CRM provides a higher return on investment, generating more revenue, more savings and a better user experience. Soffront is privately held, debt-free and profitable.

Are you working 60+ hours a week? Is it because you love to work or because your business demands it?

Many people pride themselves on putting in long hours at work. It gives them a feeling of productivity, making them feel like significant contributors to a greater cause, and giving them satisfaction, happiness, and a feeling of self-worth.

Are all those hours really productive, though? If you track the hours you spend actually working every day, you would be surprised to know that much of your time is spent thinking about your next task, tonight’s dinner, or how you’re going to get to your kid’s soccer game.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to find a solution to increase your effectiveness and efficiency at work so you could go home for dinner at a descent time?

Try replacing those long, unproductive hours with a CRM that defines processes and allows you to share information easily. You can keep to-do lists, activities with reminders, and notes which encourage immediate action. You can assign tasks to team members easily, automate work based on assignment rules, and be notified when changes happen.

By incorporating a few simple steps, you can easily increase your productivity.

Here are 10 steps to help manage your time better:

Define your work and your deliverables

Define your team and their roles

Get the right CRM module for the team

Automate as much as possible

Use dashboards to get an overview and drill down to the micro-details when required

Share required information with your team

Create reports with the click of a button

Export or import data as needed

Customize the CRM for your convenience

Get easy access to support for your implementation problems

So if you have successfully implemented your social media campaign, found your leads, and need conversions to happen, it’s time to focus on marketing automation and reap the benefit.

Snapshot CRM is the right marketing automation tool for small business and Soffront CRM is the right tool for larger businesses. Both will allow you to get best out of your marketing campaigns. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.

Look at Pinterest, one of the new emerging social media sites- its visually appealing to the mass, has more women registered than men. It has become a great tool for building brands for small businesses.

Brand building spreads the word, finds you potential customers, helps you connect and creates the awareness. But, conversion of those potential leads is a completely different ballgame.

You need a lead management tool to better track and nurture your leads. A good lead management tool provides a marketing automation campaign to send out targeted messages to the targeted leads.

A great Marketing Automation tool nurtures your lead automatically for you by:

Giving you the option to choose which leads will receive your targeted campaign

Providing multiple campaign templates

Sending out targeted multimedia messages

Allowing you to track who clicked on the links

Providing ROI monitoring

Giving you detailed and graphical reports to plan next campaign

Conversions become easier when you know whom to pitch and what to pitch.

So, if you are a small business owner and have successfully implemented your social media campaign, found your leads and need conversions to happen- it’s time to focus on the Marketing Automation and reap the benefit.

Snapshot CRM is the right marketing automation tool for small business and Soffront CRM is the right tool for larger businesses. Both will allow you to get best out of your marketing campaign. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com orwww.soffront.com.

Go-getters: The team likes to win, they compete. They like to keep track of each other’s achievements and outperform each other every day.

Team Players: Winners work great as individuals but also are great team players. Individuals working together are unbeatable. They get to know each other well, recognize strengths and work in sync to complement each other.

Mentors: They work with coaches to know their natural inclinations, strengths and work to pair well with other team players through various assessments.

The will to succeed: An extraordinary team has the will to succeed and the patience to put in the effort to reach the goal.

How do you know that they are winning? The key is in using tools and methods which allows the winning team to be a winner, one time and every time!

Good Customer Relationship Management software helps the winning team by providing detailed, real time performance reports. Simple steps are tracked with drillable data and then graphically illustrated. Success is monitored and rated in a few seconds.

A CRM tool allows them to know what the fellow team member is working on and keep the competitive edge current.

The right information in the hands of the right people can do wonders. A CRM does that quickly and efficiently. Combining data on past and present customers and prospects with information taken from the sales pipeline and forecasting tools helps to strategize a victory for the team and the organization.

Snapshot CRM is the right tool for small business and Soffront CRM is the right tool for larger businesses. Both will allow you to get best out of your winning team. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.

Cold calling has been a great tool since the telephone was invented. It has many great advantages.

The biggest advantage is that you are likely to find people who are not already in the market for your products and services. So, you beat the competition. You get a head start. You understand their current needs and challenges. You become a consultant. You start to build trust early. That is a huge advantage!

For certain businesses, cold calling is still the most efficient way to win new business. For example, if you are elephant hunting and you know the businesses to call, cold calling will probably bring the best results.

What if you are trying to sell small ticket items? What if you are trying to sell to a large population? Then cold calling may not be the most cost effective way to get new customers.

Here are other ways you can be successful:

Setup opt-in pages on your website. Invite people to subscribe to your blogs, and daily or weekly tips. People love freebies. Offer something free to encourage them to sign up. For example, offer a free healthy habit or offer a healthy recipe if you are catering to health conscious audience.

Do the same in your social media sites.

As people sign up to receive tips related to your products and services, you’re building up a database of contacts. You need to turn this database into a database of relationships. How do you do that? You do it by keeping in touch with them on a regular basis.

If you have thousands of contacts, how do you keep in touch with them on regular basis via multiple channels such as social media, SMS, email and direct mail? You need automation tools that will release you from manually nurturing relationships so you can focus on bigger and better things for your business.

Snapshot CRM is such a sales and marketing automation tool for small businesses and Soffront CRM is such a tool for larger businesses. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.